Horton’s column reflects deep hypocrisy

Gary Horton’s column today (“The GOP: still not principled leadership,” March 31) bemoaned the fact that the GOP has used the image of Nancy Pelosi on its Web site to whip up fervor for the November elections.

Sorry, Horton, but your column reflects a deep level of hypocrisy.

When the GOP was in power, the Dems were guilty of doing exactly the same kinds of things, all the time. Let’s not have any illusions about that.

Though I agree with you that Bush and company did a pretty poor job, that was because they weren’t conservative enough and didn’t stick to the principles they professed to believe in. And throughout their time in the majority the criticisms leveled at them from the left were chock full of personal hyperbole and invective, including constant efforts by some in Congress to impeach him.

The idea that the Obama/Pelosi/Reid troika should get some kind of pass because they’re performing some kind of altruistic good deed — “she copes with a daunting technological future and as she grabbles to educate her workforce in a hyper-competitive world,” as you put it — is absurd from the point of view, at least of this conservative.

What they’re trying to do, as far as I can see, is transform this country into a socialist “utopia.”

That deserves every effort to oppose them. Further, politics is and always has been a personal and dirty business. There was a time when Congressmen would whack each other with their walking sticks on the floor of the House.

You don’t get to see that anymore, especially on C-SPAN (too bad!), but your complaints about the fact that the GOP puts a face to the nature of their opposition, and particularly the face of one of the most ardent socialists, strikes me as a “do as I say, not as I do” approach.